Category Archives: Foreign Journalism

When he was running for President what so many people liked about Barack Obama was his willingness to pass praise on to others. When he would be hailed as a great orator he would go to great lengths to stress that he was the voice of a movement. When asked about his popularity he would point out that he was nothing without the grass roots.

Not any more. Today the President claimed personal credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

So far the govt have been hedging their bets a little across the Middle East. They have tended to condemn governments like Mubarak’s in Egypt and Ben Ali’s in Tunisia only when it is certain that they were going.

So tonight’s statement by David Cameron must be the final death knoll in Gaddafi’s coffin.

Those expecting a knock-on effect of the Egyptian Revolution across the Middle East should look away now. The true extent of misinformation in some of the region’s dictatorships was revealed when President Mubarak gave a speech to his people and it was completely ignored by state media in several of the Arab countries where regime change has been urged.

At a talk in parliament last night the Sinn Fein for West Tyrone Pat Doherty reacted to the news that The Queen may be about to visit Ireland for the first time. If she were to visit she would become the first British Monarch to go to Dublin since Irish Independence in 1922. Doherty, unsurprisingly perhaps, was fiercely opposed to the visit.

There is so much being unsaid in the continuing debate over the ‘Lockerbie bomber’ Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi that I felt I had to write something. It now appears that the British government may have been pressuring for the release of Al-Megrahi in order to secure economic deals with their new allies in Libya, which is contrary to international law and despicable behaviour. But this is obscuring a wider debate about whether Al-Megrahi was guilty in the first place.

Today at the Egyptian protests in London there were two separate and hostile protests that indicate the issues facing a post-Mubarak Egypt; one was secular and pro-democratic in its aims while the other was religious and supportive of a pan-Islamic caliphate.